Tesla is Deranged While Coda Does Not Pay

We all now know that the Tesla does not achieve its claimed range and is therefore deranged.  What we did not know is that the GOP’s answer to Tesla, the Coda, simply does not pay their bills.  I have oft referred to CODA as coda blue and that the Chinese electric car that gets final assembly in Benicia California would become part of the ungrateful dead.

UQM technologies, the company that supplies electric motors and controllers to CODA Automotive took a write down of $3.8 million in their receivables due to non-payment and likely never payment for items they supplied to CODA.   CODA is the brain child of Hank The Tank Paulson, GW’s secretary of the Treasury.  I mockingly call it the GOP EV but it also has strong Democrat support in form of John Bryson who was Obama’s Commerce Secretary for a short period till he crashed in a hit and run incident.

I guess UQM must have not been aware of who they were dealing with at CODA.  They forgot how Hank put the US economy in the tank, and how John made a dash after the crash.   How can a small company like UQM extend credit to CODA?  Simple they believed CODA was headed for the big time based on what Thomas Friedman of the New York Times had to say about CODA. 

I quote Thomas from September 2010 “The Coda, 14,000 of which will be on the road in California over the next year and can travel 100 miles on one overnight charge, is a combination of Chinese-made batteries and complex American-system electronics — all final-assembled in Oakland (price: $37,000). It is a win-win start-up for both countries.“

Well Tommie, UQM believed you and got taken for the ride of their life.   Those complex “American-system electronics” all came from UQM.    Actually the shareholders of UQM got taken for a ride as well.  In September 2010 their shares traded for $2.65 and are now only worth $0.71.  I am no securities expert but I think these shareholders may have a case against Thomas Friedman for hyping the CODA.

OK we now know that Tesla is deranged and Coda stiffs their supplier, so what else is new in EV land.  Bloomberg reported the following yesterday :  “Fisker Automotive Inc., the U.S. plug-in hybrid carmaker seeking a buyer, is weighing several bids, including a $350 million offer from Dongfeng Motor Corp. that would give the Chinese carmaker majority control, said people with knowledge of the matter.

Dongfeng, based in Wuhan, China, would gain 85 percent of Fisker under the terms of its bid, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the process is private. Fisker had sought bids by Feb. 6, according to that person.“

If Dongfeng buys Fisker then Oil Jazzera Gore will have a longer name and he will then be called Oil Jazeera Ding Dong Gore.   The man who swallowed the equivalent of the Qatari Orson Oil Wells was in my county on Wednesday and delivered a talk at a local university.  My state assemblyman, Marc Levine, had a photo op with Big Al (see the photo above).  I wrote to the assemblyman’s office after seeing the photo in our local paper and asked if the Assemblyman had the opportunity to ask Mr. Gore about the inconvenient truth of the Bloom Box.  Of course I never received an answer from the Assemblyman’s office.   

Perhaps the brave reporter at the New York Times that outed Tesla will write a piece on the dirty, expensive, and inefficient Bloom Box?